Fantastic First Week in #ENG3U #ICS2O

It has been an amazing first week in ENG3U – Grade 11 English and ICS2O – Grade 10 Computer Science. What I appreciate the most about these two classes is the high levels of initiative, collaboration, and inquiry that students bring every day. I know, I know – it might still be the honeymoon period and I shouldn’t jinx it, but I feel like this group will sustain themselves for the semester, provided that I bring my A-game to class, too!

The ENG3U class is working on developing essay writing skills, with a specific focus on thesis writing and the development of topics/arguments. We watched a short episode called “White Bear” from the British Netflix series Black Mirror, which includes many themes, (such as social media and technology use, victimization, and crime and punishment) with the ultimate goal of students having to create a thesis statement based on the episode. We will discuss what students came up with before moving on to additional work with essay development.

Next week, about half the class is off to Wawa for curling on Monday and Tuesday – so good luck, GCHS Knights!

The ICS2O students have begun exploring – and getting right into – the Scratch programming language. This teaching language gets students to understand the process of programming in a visual manner. Experienced coder Derrin created this very short demonstration of movement in Scratch that I appreciated. The smooth gliding of his character’s jump is pretty awesome:

So – that’s it for the first week. Thanks to my students for making my job really, really awesome!